Download PDF | Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World The Ottoman Experience, 1347-1600 by Nükhet Varlik , Cambridge University Press,2015.
356 Pages
This is the first systematic scholarly study of the Ottoman experience of plague during the Black Death pandemic and the centuries that followed. Using a wealth of archival and narrative sources, including medical treatises, hagiographies, and travelers’ accounts, as well as recent scientific research, Niikhet Varlik demonstrates how plague interacted with the environmental, social, and political structures of the Ottoman Empire from the late medieval through the early modern era. The book argues that the empire’s growth transformed the epidemiological patterns of plague by bringing diverse ecological zones into interaction and by intensifying the mobilities of exchange among both human and nonhuman agents. Varlik maintains that persistent plagues elicited new forms of cultural imagination and expression as well as a new body of knowledge about the disease. In turn, this new consciousness sharpened the Ottoman administrative response to the plague, while contributing to the makings of an early modern state.
Niikhet Varlik is Assistant Professor of History at Rutgers University— Newark. She is the author of several articles and is currently editing a collection of essays titled Plague and Contagion in the Islamic Mediterranean. She is the recipient of an NEH Fellowship by the American Research Institute in Turkey, a Senior Fellowship from Kog University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations, and a Turkish Cultural Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellowship.
Acknowledgments
This book is the result of my fascination with plague — a fascination that took me on a long and winding journey in life — but I first caught the “germs” at Bogazici University in Istanbul, and they gradually incubated and amplified at the University of Chicago; finally, the infection ran its course at Rutgers University. Along the twists and turns of the journey, I crossed paths with many people, who each in his or her special way left behind a mark on this project; their signatures are hidden in the pages of this book. I am deeply grateful to every one of those people with whom I exchanged ideas and shared long hours of discussion, frustration, and hope. This book would simply not have been brought to completion if it were not for the inspiration, support, and assistance I received from these individuals.
Going back in time to the first “seeds of disease” planted in my mind and the people who nurtured this curiosity, I would like to acknowledge the faculty in the Department of History at Bogazici University in Istanbul, in particular Nevra Necipoglu, Edhem Eldem, Selim Deringil, Selcuk Esenbel, Tony Greenwood, Giinay Kut, and Halil Berktay (now at Sabanci University). I would also like to acknowledge the support and encouragement I received from Nil Sari, of Istanbul University, and Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, formerly of the Research Center of Islamic History, Art, and Culture (IRCICA) in Istanbul.
Chicago became a second home after Istanbul. Beyond all, I am deeply grateful to Cornell Fleischer of the University of Chicago, who first saw merit in my project, welcomed me as a graduate student, and offered thorough training in Ottoman history, culture, and language. He was the one who unlocked the doors to a new cultural landscape and made me believe that I could venture into writing the history of Ottoman plagues. I thank him for his unwavering support, encouragement, and guidance and, most importantly, for being a model to emulate. As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, I had the privilege of working with Robert Dankoff, Fred Donner, Adrian Johns, Holly Shissler, and the late Farouk Mustafa. I remain grateful for everything I have learned from them.
In more recent years, I have been blessed with the support, guidance, and encouragement of scholars who transformed my perception and understanding of past plagues. Ann Carmichael of Indiana University has been an invaluable mentor, guide, and friend in this journey. I thank her from the bottom of my heart for guiding me through the difficulties of writing in moments of self-doubt and for ever-rejuvenating my passion for plague. It was thanks to her that I discovered a larger community of scholars who shared a similar passion for the subject. I am truly grateful to Monica Green, for she has transformed my thinking about plague by opening my horizons to the world of research in other disciplines, especially the new plague science. With her inexhaustible energy, dedication, and resourcefulness, she continues to be an inspiration. I would also like to acknowledge Michelle Ziegler and the other members of the plague working group, which has been an invaluable resource for keeping each of us informed and updated about new research in the field. I have benefited from these conversations in numerous ways.
I would like to acknowledge the support and encouragement I have received from my colleagues formerly in the Department of History at James Madison University and currently in the Federated Department of History at Rutgers University-Newark and NJIT. Rutgers has been a home away from home, and my colleagues have been enormously supportive in every possible way. I am honored and humbled to have such colleagues, and I thank every single one of them. At Rutgers, I would also like to thank Tuna Artun, Nahyan Fancy (of DePauw University), and the RCHA “Networks of Exchange” seminar colleagues, in particular Toby Jones and James Delbourgo. The friendship of Zeynep Celik at Rutgers has been like a breath of fresh air. I thank her for being a relentless source of support and guidance every step of the way.
Several institutions have been instrumental in supporting me as I researched and wrote this book. I am grateful for the financial support provided by the American Research Institute in Turkey (ARIT)—National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Advanced Research Fellowship; Ko¢ University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (RCAC) Senior Fellowship; and a Turkish Cultural Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellowship during the academic year 2010-11, which I spent in Istanbul. I am also grateful for research support provided by Rutgers University-Newark FASN and the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis Faculty Fellowship in 2012-13.
I conducted research for this book in several libraries and archives across two continents. I thank the librarians and archivists of Ko¢ University’s RCAC, IRCICA, Islam Arastirmalar: Merkezi (ISAM), the Department of Medical Ethics and History of Medicine at Istanbul University Cerrahpasa Medical School, Atatiirk Library, Bayezid Library, Siileymaniye Library, the Topkapi Palace Museum Archives, the Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives in Istanbul, the Joseph Regenstein Library in Chicago (especially Basima Bezirgan and Marlis Saleh of the Middle East Collection), and, last but not least, the John Cotton Dana Library and its interlibrary loan staff. I would like to thank Esra Miiyesseroglu and Sevgi Agca from the Topkap1 Palace Museum and Lauren Jones from the Orientalist Museum, Doha for their help with publication permits.
I have had the privilege of presenting earlier versions of this work and benefiting from the feedback of colleagues at various institutions. I thank them for commenting on my work in progress, offering suggestions, and sharing insights. Among these, I would like to mention in particular John Brooke, Snjezana Buzov, and Carter Findley of Ohio State University; Scott Redford of Kog¢ University-RCAC, Stefan Leder of Orient-Institut Beirut, Asa Eger of the University of North Carolina—Greensboro; the faculty at the Department of Medical History and Ethics at Istanbul University Cerrahpasa Medical School; and Tolga Esmer and Tijana Krsti¢ of Central European University. Over the many years of research and writing, several colleagues helped with research, shared sources, and answered questions about various issues. I would like to mention Zahit Atcil, Giinhan Boérekci, Rainer Bromer, John Curry, Canan Cakirlar, Semavi Eyice, Christopher Markiewicz, Miri Shefer-Mossensohn, Uli Schamiloglu, Justin Stearns, Kahraman Sakul, and Tung Sen. I am grateful for the assistance of Israa Alhassani of James Madison University, Burcak Ozliidil Altin of NJIT, William Kynan-Wilson, and Erkan Karakoyun at various stages of the preparation of this book. I would like to thank Marigold Acland, who oversaw the first stages of this project; my editor, William Hammell; Sarika Narula and Kate Gavino; and the anonymous reviewers from Cambridge University Press.
I have also enjoyed the friendship of many kindred spirits who shared ideas, offered every imaginable type of help, and, most importantly, made the journey meaningful and enjoyable. I thank Mehmetcan Akpinar, Betiil Ipsirli Argit, Abdurrahman Atcil, Buket Kitapgi Bayri, Betiil Basaran, Peter Bondarenko, Lale Can, Esin Egit, Pinar Emiralioglu, Side Emre, Mayte Green, Kelda Jamison, Ashi Niyazioglu, Ertugrul Okten, Ayse Polat, Kaya Sahin, Kabir Tambar, Ece Turnator, Gdkben Uluderya, Patrick Wing, Bike Yazicioglu, Sara Nur Yildiz, and Betiil Yilmaz. My thanks also go to my students, especially those in my recent Black Death seminar at Rutgers, for sharing my fascination with plague and resisting, against all bids, to call me Dr. Morbid.
Last but not least, I would like to mention the members of my family across two continents: my mother-in-law, Karen Hutchens; my brother, Askin Varlik, and his family; my parents, Nermin and Imdat Varlik; and my beloved children, Alanur and Evan Arda. I cannot thank them enough for their love, unwavering support, and help in every possible way. Benjamin Hutchens, my husband, love, and friend, has been absolutely the greatest source of support through this journey. I thank him for listening to me tirelessly even when the conversation was mostly about rats, fleas, and bacteria; for reading countless drafts of this work; and for making suggestions and comments, thus saving me from many embarrassing mistakes, not only thanks to his sound reasoning skills as a philosopher but also as a fervent student of history. To dedicate this book to him is the least I can do in the way of thanking him.
Note on Transliteration and Dates
To make reading easier for the nonspecialist, I have followed an eclectic and practical approach to transliteration. I have simplified book titles and personal names in Ottoman Turkish by following modern Turkish orthography and omitting diacritical marks as much as possible. Place-names, if within the boundaries of modern Turkey, are given in modern Turkish forms. For example, I have used “Trabzon” but not “Trebizond,” with the exception of place-names that are well known in Anglicized form, for example, “Gallipoli” but not “Gelibolu.” If outside Turkey, then modern English place-names are adopted, followed by the Ottoman Turkish name in parentheses the first time a place is mentioned in the text. For example, I have used “Rhodes” instead of “Rodos.” When using terms pertaining to the Islamicate culture that are already established in modern English, I have preferred Anglicized forms over Turkicized versions. For this reason, I have used “ulama” instead of “ulema,” “hadith” instead of “hadis,” “waqf” instead of “vakif,” and so on. For other such terms where an Anglicized form is not used commonly, the Turkicized version has been used, without transliteration, for example, “taun” or “askeri.” Names and book titles in Arabic and Persian in the text follow a simplified version of the I[MES transliteration system. Full transliteration is given in the bibliography. Long vowel markers have been omitted as much as possible. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine.
Introduction
This book could not have been written ten years ago — at least with the confidence we have today — without the recent spectacular new leap in plague scholarship that has transformed both humanistic and scientific research. Research in molecular archeology, and genetics in particular, has made remarkable achievements by extracting and analyzing ancient DNA (aDNA) and mapping out the phylogenetic (evolutionary) history of Yersinia pestis (the pathogen that causes the plague). In 2011, this research culminated in the reconstruction of the full genome of Y. pestis entirely from fourteenthcentury human remains. The implications of this endeavor are truly revolutionary. For plague historians in particular, this heralds liberation from decades-long reticence that dominated their field of scholarship: students of past epidemics were methodologically restrained and cautioned against the pitfalls of retrospective diagnosis, using a disease category drawn from modern microbiological knowledge and applying it anachronistically to a past where that knowledge did not exist.
Today, recognizing the significance of what science has to offer, the student of past plagues can integrate nonwritten evidence into historical analysis with great confidence. Presently, there is international scholarly consensus that the three historical pandemics that were believed to have been Y. pestis—caused plague were indeed so: the First Pandemic, known as the Justinianic Plague (541 to circa 750); the Second Pandemic, known as the Black Death (1346-53), and its recurrent waves, which continued for centuries after the initial outbreak; and the Third Pandemic, which spread globally after its eruption in Hong Kong in 1894." This book is concerned with perhaps the most controversial, the Second Pandemic. Although the new scientific research will transform what is already a monumental scholarship devoted to the Second Pandemic, there are certain historiographical caveats that one must bear in mind.
First of all, Europe has been the primary benefactor of Black Death studies and thus continues to hold a privileged position in the scholarship compared to other parts of the world that may have been at least as badly affected by it, if not more gravely. For example, our current knowledge about how various parts of Asia, the Middle East, and Africa were affected by the pandemic is at best fragmentary and disconnected. Even though fine historical studies have examined the plague experience of these areas, these are difficult to bring together owing to their temporal and spatial breadth of coverage.
Second, a substantial portion of the available plague scholarship is devoted to the initial outbreak of the mid-fourteenth-century Black Death and its consequences, at the expense of the recurrent outbreaks of the Second Pandemic that continued for several centuries. Although some exemplary studies are exceptions to this general trend, the privileged position of the Black Death itself in the scholarship is undeniable. This emphasis may feed into a distorted historical perception of post-Black Death epidemics. Bearing in mind the many waves of plague that continued after the dreadful but brief episode of the Black Death, it becomes all the more evident that the recurrent waves of the Second Pandemic are underrepresented in the scholarship.
Third, and perhaps stemming from this underrepresentation in the scholarship, how and why plague persisted for such a long time during the Second Pandemic has hitherto gone largely unexplored.* Focusing on the European case, the scholarship has often considered the Great Plague of London in 1665 or the Plague of Marseille in 1720-21 as the end of the pandemic and produced discussions of the “disappearance” of plague. However, it is well known that outbreaks of plague continued in Russia in the 1770s and in the areas controlled by the Ottoman Empire well into the nineteenth century. These cases beg for a reconsideration of the Second Pandemic’s chronological and geographical framing, the historical conditions that helped sustain it, and its effects in areas outside of Europe.
Fourth, as far as the broader Mediterranean world is concerned, the traditional scholarship seems to suffer from assumptions of differences between Christian and Muslim (or Oriental and Occidental) societies with respect to their experiences of plague. Even in studies that aim to offer a unified Mediterranean vision, these divisions play an important role in explaining the very differences in the spread of plague and the responses it stirred.3 These dichotomies not only bind the scholarly analyses to reductionist perceptions of past societies but also produce a rather thin sense of the historicity of plague epidemics and the means through which they were experienced in the Mediterranean world. In fact, there is compelling evidence in support of the Mediterranean as a unified disease zone, with shared epidemiological experiences, as well as a common heritage of medical traditions.+ To achieve a more connected understanding of the historical epidemiology of the Mediterranean world, it is imperative to study the plague experiences of those regions that are assumed to be essentially different from Europe. This book aims to contribute to a connected vision of the post—Black Death Mediterranean by integrating the Ottoman experience into the historical narrative. In these pages, we carefully position the Ottoman case on the dissection table, with a view to identifying the major nodes that were attacked by persistent outbreaks of plague, tracing the main arteries that enabled the circulation of infection and the overall responses of its people in the face of these epidemic invasions. The goal is to make it clear to the reader that the Ottoman experience of plague is not only eminently comparable to other such historical experiences but also indispensable for a better understanding of the post—Black Death Mediterranean plagues.
Fifth, and in conjunction with the previous points, the present state of the scholarship does not afford a proper understanding of the Ottoman experience of plague during the Second Pandemic. The only extensive scholarly monograph on the history of plague in the Ottoman Empire covers the years between 1700 and 1850.5 As such, the emphasis on the later centuries of the empire’s history may obscure the nature of the Ottoman experience of plague in the late medieval and early modern eras. This may especially be misleading because it seems to reproduce a historical narrative that heavily draws from a nineteenth-century Eurocentric vision of the Ottoman society and projects this vision to earlier eras. According to this narrative, the Ottoman Empire, as the “sick man of Europe,” came to represent a plague exporter, the home of all plagues that assailed Europe’s shores. With this in view, Europe strove to protect itself by implementing quarantine measures and establishing cordons sanitaires. But how is it that the Ottoman Empire is understood to be the primary plague exporter to Europe when the Ottomans’ own experience of plague still remains unknown in the scholarship: when and how did it arrive in the Ottoman world, how did it circulate there, how did its people perceive it, and what, if anything, did the administration of the empire do about it? Curiously, whereas scholars interested in the European experience of plague are satisfied with the conclusion that plague came from the Ottoman Empire and have little or no interest in how it originated there, the historians of the Ottoman Empire rarely assign much importance to the role of plague in the empire’s history. Scholars working outside the field of Ottoman studies cannot be expected to interest themselves in plague in the Empire if the Ottomanist scholarship does not produce the research that would assist them in doing so. And yet the plague in the Ottoman-ruled areas before the eighteenth century has remained largely unexplored. Was there no plague in the empire before 1700 worth being the subject of a scholarly monograph? Surely there was, as allegedly all European plagues originated there, but silence prevails.
The reasons for the silence in the Ottomanist scholarship can barely be accounted for by the depiction of the Ottoman Empire in this particular manner. Rather, there is a complex web of historical and historiographical reasons why this subject remains a béte noire in this field of scholarship, especially for the first centuries of Ottoman history, as is discussed at length in these pages. However, suffice it to say here that despite the recent flurry of interest in the subject, there exists no systematic study of the geographical and chronological scope of plague epidemics that affected the Ottoman lands before the eighteenth century, let alone an exploration of the nature of the specific diseases involved in them; their social, economic, demographic, and other such effects on Ottoman society; or the Ottoman perceptions of (and responses to) this phenomenon. Indeed, these have hitherto remained largely unexplored in the Ottomanist historiography.
In view of these limitations in the scholarship, this book takes upon itself the twofold task of demonstrating that Ottomanist literature should take plague more seriously and that studies of historical epidemiology should grant the Ottoman experience its due consideration. For doing so, on one hand, we seek to answer the question of why the Ottoman experience matters for an understanding of the post-Black Death Mediterranean plagues. On the other hand, we deal with the question of why plague matters for an understanding of Ottoman history. By addressing these questions, this book seeks to demonstrate that the histories of plague in the Mediterranean world and that of the Ottoman Empire should be considered in conjunction with each other.
Plague and Empire
In the following pages, I argue that the growth of the Ottoman Empire and the expansion of plague epidemics are intimately entwined. With a view to demonstrating this entwinement, this book reconstructs a historical narrative of plagues that affected Ottoman-controlled areas from the Black Death to the end of the sixteenth century (1347-1600), traces their trajectories and recurrence, and establishes their links to the patterns of growth and consolidation of the Ottoman power, with a special emphasis on conquest, urbanization, and networks of exchange.
Why this chronological frame? It should be noted at the outset that the selection of this time frame has been a conscious one. The study of this two-and-a-half-century-long period is critical for demonstrating the intimate relationship of plague and empire: not least because this era coincides with both the expansion of the Ottoman power and that of the plague, but more importantly because this is when the basic trajectories of dissemination of the epidemics took shape. This is especially true for what is referred to in this book as the long sixteenth century, that is, from the conquest of Constantinople to the end of the sixteenth century. Plague outbreaks gradually became more frequent and widespread in Ottoman cities during this era; hence, tracing the spatial distribution and periodicity of plagues of the long sixteenth century promises to afford a better understanding of plagues of the post-1600 period. Moreover, this is also when we see a critical change in the Ottoman perceptions of (and responses to) plagues, which may help explain the developments that followed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
At this point, it may be useful to remember the observation made by a great historian of medicine about two decades ago. In his colossal book The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, the late Roy Porter pointed out that empires, like trade and wars, triggered the spread of epidemic diseases.° Even though Porter had the early modern Spanish example in mind, his insightful comment still holds true for other empires in that era. As a matter of fact, empires and plagues have often been mentioned in conjunction with each other in historical scholarship. One does not fall short of finding examples of “great plagues” in the “great empires” of history.
It is interesting to note, however, that plagues more readily conjure up associations with the “fall” of empires.? Regardless, the relationship between the two historical phenomena remains insufficiently explored. Instead, there seems to be a stronger inclination to associate pandemics with historical phenomena that had effects on a larger, hemispheric scale. Perhaps because empires conjure up notions of borders and boundaries, large-scale events such as pandemics seem to have called historians to adopt a world-historical perspective. It is no coincidence that historical studies of epidemics and pandemics have often emphasized the process of globalization as the fundamental modality for facilitating the spread of disease. However, historians of empires caution us against overexploiting the concept of “globalization,” especially for the premodern era. For the sixteenth century, for example, Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper remind us that “thinking about a history of connections” can afford a better understanding than that offered by “globalization.”*® It is thus critical not to project modern definitions of globalization onto the premodern world, where the precise nature of disease spread is blurred. Even though it is true that regional systems emerged in the premodern world and that their gradual integration contributed to the formation of a global system, this was not a linear process by which globalization was achieved in a smooth and uncontested manner. Despite the insights offered by such notions as “microbial unification” or the emergence of “disease zones,” how exactly the assumed process of gradual globalization furthered the spread of disease remains far from clear. Hence, with regard to disease spread, thinking about a history of connections might serve our purposes better.
In the example of the early modern Mediterranean, the driving force for these connections seems to have been assumed by (multi-)regional empires: the growth of territorial or tributary empires,'° rather than a process of global unification, seems to constitute a better context for understanding the spread of epidemic disease. These empires, not only as political entities but also as configurations of networks of exchange, seem to have been the principal agents of epidemic expansion in the early modern era. Conceived in this manner, empires exercise myriad forms of power (such as military, administrative, or economic) along the connections they nurture and proliferate. Plague, like trade goods, people, animals, and ideas, circulated along these networks. As this book shows, the growth of the Ottoman domains produced an increased level of communication, interaction, and mobility between individual regions brought together by conquest. These newly conquered regions came to be bound within an administrative, military, and commercial system. Indeed, it did not take long for widespread plagues to follow. Consolidating the intersecting trade networks connecting the Balkans, Caucasus and Central Asia, Asia Minor, the Arabian Peninsula, Persia, North Africa, and the eastern Mediterranean provided a new set of connections over which plague could spread extensively both within the Ottoman domains and beyond. In this manner, the rise and expansion of the Ottoman Empire constituted a constellation of connections for the spread of plague in the post-Black Death Mediterranean.
Plague Ecologies
Plague is an infectious disease caused by a bacterium, Y. pestis, that attacks the lymph nodes, usually causing inflammation that produces painful swellings in the groin, armpit, or neck, called buboes — a characteristic symptom of bubonic plague. Other symptoms, such as fever, chill, headache, and extreme exhaustion, may accompany buboes. If the bacteria infect the lungs, pneumonic plague develops, which then can be transferred from person to person via infected droplets spread in the air as a result of coughing or sneezing. When the bacteria multiply in the bloodstream, fatal septicemia may develop, causing shock, organ failure, and sudden death. In bubonic form, plague may be fatal (between 40 to 70 percent mortality). Today, bubonic plague can be treated successfully with antibiotics if diagnosed early. Pneumonic plague, however, still remains a fatal condition that can kill within twenty-four hours if not treated promptly. Even though some may believe that plague is a disease of the past that conjures up images of the Middle Ages, it is very much alive in some parts of the world (e.g., the southwestern United States, Central Asia, Madagascar), where it is enzootic among rodent populations and may “spill over” to human populations."'
Once plague is introduced to a new environment, if the infection finds a rodent population to sustain it, it tends to form enzootic foci, either in the wild or in human settlements. The enzootic foci in the wild normally are not a direct threat for human societies. Only those individuals who come into close contact with infected or dead plague carriers (rodents or other mammals) or their arthropod vectors would be exposed to risk. Hence, it is possible to imagine that the infection can be carried to human settlements near enzootic foci. In such places, this sort of sporadic isolated breakout probably occurred often enough, without being documented in the historical sources. Even when the infection is communicated to the commensal rodents living in close proximity to humans, there would be local and perhaps repeated outbreaks. Even if no communication existed among infected human settlements (no trade, no travel, etc.), enzootic plague could still continue and produce epizootics and epidemics at times. Such breakouts would allow us to identify their area of origin, spread, range, and periodicity, in some recognizable patterns. For example, when plague was introduced (or reintroduced) to Anatolia and the Balkans during the Black Death, it affected certain locations, circulated along main routes, and eventually died down each time, to recur every ten to fifteen years. This being the typical behavior of the plague, it continued more or less in this manner until the mid-fifteenth century or so.
Starting in the second half of the fifteenth century, plagues occurring in Ottoman lands diverged from these patterns. From then on, the spread and frequency of the outbreaks become unrecognizably different, so much so that, for example, there is a recorded incidence of plague in Istanbul almost every year. This divergence certainly demands an explanation. I argue that this explanation needs to be sought in the formation of the Ottoman Empire. To build a centralized empire, the Ottoman polity regulated, mobilized, and organized its “natural” resources, including crops, livestock, people, and minerals. These items circulated in a manner imposed by the empire’s administration — the effects of such ecological engineering have been shown convincingly in recent works.'* As an unintended consequence, the very same constellation of connections helped circulate plague. This book is an attempt to demonstrate the effects of the empire’s ecological management with respect to plague.
Plague Networks
Throughout the book, the reader will encounter terms, such as plague networks, networks of exchange, or networks of disease exchange, that will be used almost interchangeably. In addition, I also refer to plague hubs (major and minor) and plague nodes along these networks. What do I mean by these terms? I refer to a plague network as a dynamic set of relationships that not only enable the flow of the disease but also simultaneously circulate its meaning and effects as well as perceptions and knowledge about it along each node and segment of these connections. Thus, at its simplest level, one can conceive of a plague network as a set of circuits or pathways that connect a plague focus (a reservoir of plague, in which the infection is kept alive by animal hosts without causing large-scale mortality) to a human settlement, where the disease may assume an epidemic form. At a slightly more complex level of analysis, several urban and rural human settlements that are connected to one another with commercial, diplomatic, or economic relationships can be superimposed onto the simple set of trajectories that connected plague foci to them. In this picture, plague nodes and hubs are useful conceptual tools. Further expanding the scope spatially can help us identify larger zones of plague exchange. Each of these sets of relationships can be conceptualized as a plague network.
Why plague networks? Looking at the experience and effects of plague in a given city or region can tell a lot. For example, it is possible to reconstruct the experience of a community with the disease at the local level. However, expanding the scope of the inquiry both temporally and geographically can offer new ways of understanding. Thus, tracing change through mobility and movement can add tremendous insight to the analysis. It may be possible, for instance, to detect patterns of spread, trajectories, and frequency.
More importantly, a conceptualization of disease along a set of relations in time and space can also expose social, political, and economic structures and inequalities. For example, the effects of plague were more visibly dramatic in Istanbul than elsewhere in the Ottoman realm. If not entirely an artifact of the sources, then plague, along with its opportunistic rodent hosts and parasitic vectors, was a free rider that moved toward centers of affluence. It may have moved toward the Ottoman capital in the same way that silk, wool, and fur did; just as sugar, spice, and rice did; and just as the same people, knowledge, and texts did. Istanbul was where multiple networks converged. Hence, most of our story is in or about Istanbul, and in this sense the picture that emerges in this book is heavily Istanbul-centric. To be sure, there were cases of plague in other cities and villages of the empire, but they do not receive equal attention in these pages. Yet, this should not be read as an apology owing to the emphasis given to Istanbul in the sources. Being fully aware of this methodological predicament, the historical analysis in this book aims to demonstrate an epidemiological phenomenon that may be called the capital effect. According to this, large urban areas, especially capitals of empires, tend to be visited by a greater number of epidemics than smaller towns or villages. Large cities like Istanbul worked like magnets; just as they attracted goods, people, capital, and knowledge, they also attracted disease. In the context of the political economy of an early modern empire, Istanbul’s history can be reconstructed as the capital of plague.
Furthermore, studying plague networks allows glimpses of how the imperial power was operationalized. Not only the circulation of plague along those networks but also the flow of reports and regulations about the disease may help in understanding this. As the case may be, the empire projected power from the center, but this power was not felt and exercised everywhere in the exact same manner. The imperial power was mediated within a given set of relationships at the local level. As a rule, the center sent agents to provinces in charge of carrying messages, documents, and papers on which imperial decrees were formulated. Provincial administrators formulated responses and translated, mediated, and negotiated these decisions while drawing from firsthand knowledge of local circumstances. As far as cases of reporting plague are concerned, it may be possible to trace the processes, identify the agencies, and witness how local knowledge was used to define, refine, and modify the imperial vision of power. Taken as a whole, then, the empire itself consisted of a set of connections, operationalized at every step of the way through projections, mediations, and negotiations of power. Just like the plague, the empire operated on a porous, uneven, and patchy space, amid the nodes and trajectories that constantly strove to bring them together. Thus, this was as much an empire of paper, politics, and power as it was an empire of plague.
Last, we may need to address briefly the question of whether the recorded increase of plague reflects a real increase or a historical artifact. Both narrative and archival sources suggest an increase in recorded incidence of plagues in the sixteenth century and especially in its latter half. However, there is also an overall increase in record keeping in the very same period. Although this problem seems not an easily quantifiable one and may have had its share in shaping our historical perception, it may nevertheless prove itself to be framed, not in terms of an either-or dichotomy, but instead as concomitant manifestations of a larger force at work. In other words, instead of situating more plague in opposition to better recording, I propose apposing them as signs and symptoms of the formation of an imperial body and its vital networks facilitating collecting, recording, and distributing information, on one hand, and circulating disease, on the other. Hence, I suggest that the very same mechanisms sustained and enabled both plague and its mobilities of exchange.
Periodization, Sources, and Terminology
This book follows a system of periodization that draws from Ottoman political and military history, more specifically, from key Ottoman conquests, as well as from major plague outbreaks. For reasons elaborated at length in the following pages of this book, Ottoman conquests had a significant effect on plagues. Hence, the selection of dates such as 1453 or 1517 is owed to the lasting effects of those conquests for studying the Ottoman history of plagues. Such dates are used in conjunction with a periodization drawn from dates of outbreaks, such as the cases of 1347 and 1570. The obvious methodological complications of developing a system of periodization of plague notwithstanding, the approach adopted here offers some practical advantages. The secondary literature on the history of plague in the Mediterranean world (especially for the areas adjacent to the Ottomans and/or those conquered by them) has followed this system of periodization — for example, historians of the Byzantine Empire generally tend to study the history of plague until 1453.4 Similarly, historians working on Syria and Egypt limit their history of plague chronologically to the end of the Mamluk era, that is, the Ottoman conquest of 1516-17." Therefore adopting this system of periodization facilitates the production of comparable data with respect to epidemiological patterns, such as frequency and spread.
As concerning sources, this work utilizes a range and variety. Given the uncharted nature of the early Ottoman plagues, bringing a mixture of sources has been indispensable. As always, the usual suspects for the Ottoman historian, the archival and narrative sources, have been critical for establishing the basic structure of plague outbreaks and for tracing their movements, effects, and the like. However, those sources tend to run short when it comes to exploring the meaning and mentalities of plague, especially in the early part of this study’s time frame. Hence, it is worthwhile to complement them with hagiographies, legal and medical discussions of plague, and, when possible, works of poetry. In addition, works of travel literature penned by visitors to Ottoman lands, as well as a rather limited pool of Byzantine, Mamluk, Armenian, and Venetian sources, were also exploited. In due course, an unusually helpful body of knowledge came from the latest scientific literature on plague, including in the areas of bioarcheology, zoology, entomology, and microbiology.
The problems concerning the Ottoman terminology of plague may benefit from some clarification here. Ta an and veba’ were the most commonly used terms by the Ottomans in reference to plague. These terms had their origins in classical Arabic, ta vin and wabda’, respectively. In theory, while ta in was used in reference to bubonic plague specifically, waba’ referred to pestilence or epidemic disease in general. Yet, much confusion accompanied their use, leading scholars to formulate a clarification. Thus, the scholars writing in Arabic after the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century suggested that “every ta tin is a waba’, but not every waba’ is a ta in.” ‘° Ottoman sources seem to have taken on this distinction, at least in theory. In practice, however, ta un and veba’ could be used almost interchangeably for emphasis or stylistic purposes, especially in nonmedical sources. In addition to these terms of Arabic origin, there were other terms used in reference to epidemic diseases in the vernacular Turkish, in both medical and nonmedical Ottoman sources. For example, yumurcak (or yumrucuk, “plague bubo”) and /ryarcik were often used to refer to bubonic plague, particularly before the sixteenth century. In addition, 6let, which was used mainly in nonmedical works, can perhaps best be translated as “pestilence” or “mortality.” ‘7
While the Ottoman medical sources have from the outset maintained a clear identification of plague (ta an) as distinct from other epidemic diseases, nonmedical sources could use ta ain and vebd’ indiscriminately. Nevertheless, members of the Ottoman society had come to possess at least a basic working knowledge of the plague to identify and distinguish it from other diseases. After all, as is shown here, from 1347 onward, plague was an integral part of life for members of Ottoman society — a disease any adult would have witnessed at least a few times in a lifetime, if he was fortunate enough to survive it.
As Ottoman society became more and more familiar with plague — I situate this process somewhere in the late sixteenth century — the use of the term fa tin (as well as yumurcak and let) started to diminish. As the plague (ta tin) came to establish itself as the epidemic disease in Ottoman life, it gradually lost its original name as plague (ta aim) and came to be referred to as the epidemic (veba’) or the disease (hastalik or maraz). The terminology used in reference to plague is discussed later in the book, but suffice it to give here an example for such use. A late-sixteenth-century letter sent to the Topkap1 Palace in the midst of a plague outbreak reads, “Hig ol mitbarek hastaliksuz yer yokdur” (There is no place free from that blessed disease).'® To its contemporaries, the reference was clear: the plague! Perhaps the living testimony of the persistence of plague and the growing familiarity of Ottoman society with it left behind its legacy in the late Ottoman and modern Turkish usage of the term, whereupon the term veba came to mean “plague.”
Structure of the Chapters
The book has three parts. Part I is mainly conceived as a background, which seeks to situate the Ottoman plague experience in the larger context of history and historiography. In three chapters, it tackles the double problem of explaining why plague matters for Ottoman history to the Ottomanists and why the Ottoman experience of plague matters to the non-Ottomanist plague historians. To this end, it gives a critical account of the plague scholarship of the Second Pandemic, highlights some of the issues relevant to the Ottoman experience, and focuses on how the Ottoman experience enables us to explain those issues. Chapter 1 is a natural history of plague as experienced in the Ottoman areas. It largely relies on scientific evidence but, whenever possible, draws from historical sources to flesh out the natural history of plague. It can be read as a synthesis of the latest scientific research on plague in the particular climatic, environmental, and social context of early modern Ottoman life. Chapter 2 addresses problems of the historiography of plague, both in the Ottomanist and non-Ottomanist scholarship. It tells the story of why the history of early Ottoman plagues has not been explored until now. In doing so, it offers a corrective to misconceptions about the Ottoman experience of plague, such as in the example of the trope of the fatalistic Turk, whose genealogy is sketched. Chapter 3 presents a brief account of the Black Death and the century that followed it (13471453), as experienced by the Ottomans and in the areas adjacent to them. It includes a first attempt to trace the trajectory of the spread of the Black Death in the interior of the Anatolian peninsula, as opposed to the current emphasis on coastal spread. The chapter also addresses the historical links between the Black Death and early Ottoman expansion.
Part II of the book aims to demonstrate the influence of the Ottoman territorial expansion on the spread, periodicity, and effects of plague outbreaks. In three chapters, it reconstructs the narrative history of Ottoman plagues in the long sixteenth century (1453-1600). As a first attempt to create a systematic compilation of Ottoman plagues in this era, it traces the movement of the disease both spatially and temporally. For doing so, it presents the material in three distinct phases, each presented in one chapter. Chapter 4 is devoted to the first phase of epidemiological activity (1453-1517), which is mainly characterized by plagues moving eastward, from the European ports of the Mediterranean toward Ottoman cities. The chapter aims to shed light on the relationship between Ottoman urban growth and plagues in this era. Chapter 5 focuses on the second phase (1517-70), which is underscored by the multiplication of trajectories of plague spread in the growing Ottoman domains. Following the movement of plagues, the chapter seeks to explore the changing patterns of epidemiological activity in the entangled histories of Ottoman conquests, trade, and urbanization. Chapter 6 surveys the third phase (1570-1600), which epitomizes the consolidation of Ottoman plague networks. It focuses on the emergence of Istanbul as the plague hub of the empire and examines the modalities of epidemiological exchange between the capital and the provinces.
Part III of the book explores how this plague experience affected Ottoman society. In two chapters, it seeks to examine how this experience shaped the beliefs and ideas of the Ottomans about plague and their responses to it. Chapter 7 aims to reconstruct how the Ottomans understood plague, what they knew about it, and how they conducted themselves in the face of it. It seeks to demonstrate that the Ottomans’ perceptions and knowledge of plague as well as their attitudes toward it changed considerably over the course of the sixteenth century, as they watched plague persist in their lands. The chapter examines these changes in the context of the political, economic, social, and cultural changes of early modern Ottoman history.
In the light of the findings, Chapter 8 reconstructs the Ottoman administrative response to plagues by surveying the efforts at healthscaping in early modern Istanbul and, to a lesser extent, in other Ottoman cities. It seeks to demonstrate that the persisting plague outbreaks forced the hand of the Ottoman administration in developing measures to deal with the consequences of high mortality. By keeping records of plague mortality, regulating burial space, and cleansing cities of perceived sources of filth (both physical and moral), the Ottoman administration started to experiment with new technologies of governance and surveillance of bodies. Taken as a whole, the combined efforts of the politics of bodies not only laid the foundations of a system of public health but also contributed to the making of the early modern Ottoman state.
These three parts in eight chapters are followed by a brief epilogue, which makes some general remarks about the implications of this research. It highlights the areas of research that await scholarly interest and calls for comparison of the Ottoman experience of plague to other contemporary or near-contemporary historical examples.
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